Welcome to the Golden Dozen, and our xxxth weekly round-up from the Lib Dem blogosphere … Featuring the five most popular stories beyond Lib Dem Voice according to click-throughs from the Aggregator (-, 2017), together with a hand-picked seven you might otherwise have missed.

Don’t forget: you can sign up to receive the Golden Dozen direct to your email inbox — just click here — ensuring you never miss out on the best of Lib Dem blogging.

As ever, let’s start with the most popular post, and work our way down:

And now to the seven blog-posts that come highly recommended, regardless of the number of Aggregator click-throughs they attracted. To nominate a Lib Dem blog article published in the past seven days – your own, or someone else’s, all you have to do is drop a line to [email protected] You can also contact us via Twitter, where we’re @libdemvoice

7.Remainers’ Diary Day 246 by Josephine Hayes on Facebook.
A good rebuttal of the “a big majority will strengthen my hand” nonsense. “As has been repeatedly pointed out, increasing the size of the Tories’ majority will make no difference to the UK’s bargaining position at all. It can’t, any more than changing the crew on the Titanic would have made any difference when the course was still set for a crash into an iceberg at full speed.”

12. What is the meaning of Theresa May’s wobble? by Matthew Green on A Thinking Liberal.
A post written before Manchester and concluded afterwards. Is the Dementia Tax problem more about May’s lack of consultation with her own side?

And that’s it for another week. Happy blogging ‘n’ reading ‘n’ nominating.

23 Comments

If it is correct that Peter Mandelson’s objective in the 2010 general election was to minimise the losses of Gordon Brown’s Labour Party then Mandelson or Brown should say so because it is being argued that the current Labour leadership is following the same strategy. Former MP Tony Benn used to refer to 1945 as the policy to follow, but paying for that was difficult. One of the most brilliant economists who have ever lived, John Maynard Keynes, a Liberal, exhausted himself trying to obtain funding from USA, succeeded and died. The IFS have been critical.
The opinion poll in the Sunday Times puts the Tories, or whatever they call themselves nowadays, at 43%, which is enough to give them an overall majority in the Commons, despite the nervous wobble caused by Theresa May’s U-turn.
“You turn if you want to, the lady’s not for turning” said Maggie May.
It follows that Tim Farron’s analysis that the Tories will get an overall majority and we are providing a different, logical analysis is still correct.
Arguing that that Jeremy Corbyn could be the next PM is farcical and absurd. Defence Secretary Michael Fallon (Conservative, Sevenoaks) is saying that, which leaves people wondering about the judgement of someone with such an important job.

Eugene, and what are you doing about the Labour campaigns against the Lib Dems in Southport, Leeds NW, Sheffield Hallam, North Norfolk, Carshalton and Wallington, Ceredigion, Westmorland and Lonsdale and probably O&S?

Raising VAT to 20% in the middle of the worst recession since the Great Depression, is just about as stupidly neo-liberal as it is possible to be! Any true Keynesian would have resigned from Government over that and argued that the Lib Dems resign from the Coalition too!

Labour’s campaign in Eastbourne simply attacks Liberal Democrats. A Labour leaflet I saw on Saturday was mainly composed of a vicious attack on us and upon Stephen Lloyd, our candidate. There was no mention of the Conservatives. Progressive Alliance?

The Labour Party rejected any Progressive Alliance and has always rejected deals with other parties, something the Liberal Democrats would have been well advised to follow in view of what has happened whenever they failed to do so. Here the Greens and Labour are still banging on about the coalition, even those who want people to vote Liberal Democrat to keep the Conservatives out. It is not looking good.

“The Labour Party rejected any Progressive Alliance and has always rejected deals with other parties, something the Liberal Democrats would have been well advised to follow in view of what has happened whenever they failed to do so”

The Labour Party has not always rejected deals but usually it does. We have to distinguish between the Labour Party , nationally, and its supporters and members locally. The Labour vote in Richmond largely went to the Lib Dems just recently for example.

So given the right circumstances, a Lib Dem candidate can beat a Tory with unofficial Labour support. When there’s a high degree of tactical voting in other words. There does need to be some reciprocation though. Does anyone think that really happens? Or does the Lib Dem vote split 50:50 between Labour and Tory when Lib Dems do their own tactical voting?

” Here the Greens and Labour are still banging on about the coalition”

There’s been a fair bit of “banging on” about that on LibDemVoice too! The coalition is only two years ago. Nick Clegg is still prominent in the party. Orange Book thinking is prevalent too.

I’d say it might take closer to two decades than two years for you to be completely forgiven for propping up Cameron and Osborne as you did. It would have been better for you and better for the country to have let them run with a minority government for a couple of years then had fresh elections.

@ Michael BG, I have no idea how many seats we will get but a Target list of 34 (if I got that right) sounds like way too many to me. Right now the Betting Markets are suggesting that we will get around 15 Seats, I would be very happy with that but it seems a bit optimistic.
Our Polling average seems to have levelled out at 8%, the same as we got in 2015 but with much higher Tory figures than 2 Years ago ( currently up by 7%) we might reasonably expect fewer than 8 MPs unless we focus on fewer Seats.
Its quite possible that the Polls are underestimating our support but we cant rely on that.

paul barker, theakes: You are assuming uniform national swing, which I don’t think is applicable. Tory rise is likely due to straight Tory-Labour switching by small-c conservative working-class traditional Labour voters mostly in seats we never had a chance of winning anyway. Our task in our target seats is to ensure that anti-Tory voters know that we are the alternative to the Tories, or in the few seats that are Lab-LibDem contests, that we are a more effective opposition than Labour.

If the party want to run a campaign in 10 650th’s of the country instead of the entire country they will have to be careful not to give ten different messages playing to ten different audiences, because that was partly how a party with a solid 50+ seats and 20%+ of the votes ended up needing rebuilt. Don’t do that again.

Well, I am really glad that I dont have to take the decisions about Targeting, get it wrong either way & we could lose good MPs who could have won. The Party consensus seems to be that we should err on the side of pessimism & I agree with that.
I am not even going to attempt to predict Seat numbers, in the long term I beleive Vote share matters more anyway.

paul barker: But in the short term, and especially in the NOW, number of seats is what matters most. Even if our vote share flatlines, if we double our seats through targeting we will be seen as successful.

@ Paul Barker
I think it is 33 seats. The total number is an interesting question. In 2010 we won 57 seats and lost 13. Therefore it seems safe to assume we targeted 70 seats. According to Wikipedia in 2010 we had 65,038 members. We have been told we have more than 100,000 members now. It seems logical to me that we should be able to target at least 57 seats in this general election because our manpower is over 50% greater than in 2010. (I think it is odd that I am more optimistic than you now! 🙂 ) We have to target more seats than we will win.

@ Alex Macfie
I also do not believe in an uniform swing across all seats.

@ Nick Collins
“With nine campaigning days left, don’t you think it’s a little late to be discussing which seats, or how many, to target?”

Hopefully there was a better informed discussion yesterday on which seats to drop or add to the tear 1 seats, because we are now entering the final week for canvassing

Thanks for the replies.
LibDems are very successful in by-elections because you FOCUS your resources. Your track record is astonishing. It all falls to bits when all seats are up for election.
Make sure you get these 10 to 15 Tory seats…that cuts their majority by thirty.

I think this is what the party has done by pushing for a second referendum, increased its national share of the vote and decreased its seats. This is because lib dem votes are more concentrated than leave vs remain support. The vote was 52/48 but the most leave place is only about 75/25.

If 25% of your 2015 voters were leave voters switching to conservative because of the second referendum you lose 2% nationally and 10% in an area where the party won the seat with 40% of the vote. If 3% come across to the party nationally as a result of the 2nd referendum policy the national vote share is then 9% but 33% where it was previously 40%.

This is what I think is happening, not long until I find out for sure though.

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